An unexplained ‘void’ appears to be pushing the Milky Way through the Universe at 2 million km/h

We’re fleeing from a mysterious ‘dead zone’

You can’t feel it, but our planet is orbiting the Sun at speeds of roughly 100,000 km/h (62,000 mph), and something is making our Milky Way galaxy move through the Universe at more than 2 million km/h (1.2 million mph). That’s 630 km per second, and now scientists might have finally figured out why.

In front of us, there’s a dense supercluster of galaxies some 650 million light-years away called the Shapley Concentration, and it’s pulling us towards it. Behind us, scientists have found evidence of a previously unknown region of space that’s almost entirely devoid of galaxies, and it’s pushing us away with incredible force.

Cosmologist Yehuda Hoffman from Hebrew University in Israel and his team have constructed a new 3D map of our nearest galaxies, and in it, they’ve revealed this mysterious ‘dead zone’ for the first time, and dubbed it the Dipole Repeller.